Mar 24
#40: Cherry 🍒 Sprint
A painter must trust muscle memory: do first, think second — Brain Rutenberg
1. Studio
wuruwuru exists because I think it’s important to have a space (albeit virtual) for independent makers like myself to play, learn, get feedback, exchange ideas and create high-quality collective art and documentation without the pressure of making money.
And now I went and signed up four other people: T as a designer and community manager, N as writer and editor, E as writer and storyboard artist and W as a product manager.
2. Money
We’re currently working on two flagship projects: Hanky Panky, a 3-minute animation and Feel Good, a book of short stories. We’re making them with about thirty-something collaborators remotely using Google, Basecamp, Notion, Zoom and WhatsApp.
Hanky Panky will cost about $20k to produce, while Feel Good has a budget of $15k. Salaries and subscriptions come to about $2500 per month. Assuming one year is enough to publish both projects (and we do nothing else), we’d have spent $65,000 by March 2023.
I’m going to try to make (some of) this money back through crowdfunding because the time feels right: Nigeria has global attention thanks to music and tech, independent publishing tools are better and more accessible, international payments is much less of a hassle, and crypto has created wealth for a local community of people who appreciate art.
My theory is that with good design, excellent marketing, valuable rewards and an overall delightful customer experience, we can get strangers on the internet to fund production. This model also reflects the essence of the studio as a community project (see also Sporting Lagos).
Another reason this needs to work is that I don’t have the energy for venture capital or debt financing. My backup plan is to invest in something that makes enough profit to run the studio, and my last resort is to hire a professional to help raise money from cultural institutions.
If all of this doesn’t work, then that’s it.
3. Scrum
With this experiment in sustainability, wuruwuru is by definition a startup — not a VC-funded technology company, but a startup nonetheless.
These days, I’m learning to manage and scale the Paystack Design team (which itself is now kind of a startup within a company), so I’m applying my lessons wholesale to the studio. I enjoy the contrast between both teams and find them symbiotic. I export the knowledge from my job — values, systems, goal setting, deliverables planning, scrum, design process, documentation, performance management etc — to the studio, which in turn makes me better on the job because I get to test these systems on a smaller, less organised scale and find room for improvement.
As PM, W will be scrum master for the studio. Our first sprint (Cherry 🍒) started last week and will end in March. The goal is housekeeping — documenting systems and processes, signing contractor agreements, setting up financial accounts and prototyping a new website, and our routine is a 1 hour Tuesday morning kickoff, 15 minute stand-ups on Wednesday and Thursday, and async project updates on Friday.
The objective for this first sprint is to establish scrum on the team.
4. Work in Progress
I’ve read only one so far, but N says we now have five Feel Good stories and they’re all different yet interesting. Whoop! There’s a lot of editing in progress, and there’s no deadline for that, so we’ll just have to wait and see how many stories are done by month-end.
As for Hanky Panky, Joshua sent in concept images and they look great. The colour choices for the characters turned out nicely and he nailed the dream scene. Now that he’s done, he’s back to clean-ups and tie-downs.
I recently put up the latest prototype of the film on Vimeo. Nothing has changed visually, but this one includes a Nollywood-style soundtrack that makes Aunty Yuwa’s dialogue a little unsettling. The second is more laidback and (unintendedly) sounds like Osas’ heartbeat. Both have their pros and cons, but ultimately we agreed that it was best to start from scratch and agree on function before form.
What I’m looking forward to the most this sprint though, is the website prototype. The new website is more content-heavy and tells a more compelling story of what the studio looks like now.
Can’t wait to share.
